Boykoff: Our individualized climate mindset is stymieing our collective capabilities
In this season of gift giving, Amazon ordering, festive eating and voracious traveling to spend time with family and friends, we may pause and reflect on our U.S.-sized consumption habits. When we map this onto considerations of sustainability — despite larger forces of normalization and naturalization of these ravenous activities — we nonetheless may feel pangs of guilt for partaking in these carbon-emitting holiday pleasures that contribute to climate change.
Some of us may cope with individualized strategies, such as taking shorter showers, buying voluntary carbon offsets, recycling, buying local, composting and pedaling to the shops. We have the most control over ourselves, after all. We can also lead by example, signal virtues and hopefully inspire others to engage in environmentally-friendly behaviors too. However, this stance on minimizing environmental harm is both impotent and destined for failure to significantly impact positive change.
Fundamentally, at all scales, everything counts. The planet keeps score. Individual actions add up. Yet, there are several important reasons why individual actions alone — even sincere and heroic ones — are insufficient.
But when individual actions are only a collection of individual actions, they amount to weak responses in the context of large-scale global environmental challenges. Positive “greening” of our daily activities may soothe our consciousness, but a sole focus on the individual consumer level runs the risk of displacing or subsuming attention paid to larger-scale organizational carbon practices in the private as well as public sectors.
The average carbon emissions of someone living their entire life in the U.S. is significant when compared to other humans across the globe: nearly twice the amount of someone in China, about 2.5 times higher than someone in the European Union, and about 6.5 times higher than someone in India. Yet, the lifetime emissions of a U.S. individual are the equivalent of Exxon Mobil’s emissions in just 6 seconds. In fact, 90 oil and gas companies (called the “Carbon Majors”) have been found to account for nearly two-thirds of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane/natural gas (CH4) emissions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. So instead of engaging in casting aspersions on your neighbor for cranking the heat this winter, we might make a new year’s resolution to instead more carefully scrutinize CEO decision-making of Carbon Majors like British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Peabody Energy, BHP Billiton, Saudi Aramco, Exxon, Statoil, Chevron and Gazprom.
Furthermore, spotlighting individuals-as-consumers distracts from the responsibilities of political leaders and policy actors to engage in policy decisions that help to grapple more effectively with the larger-scale environmental challenges. These policy actions also then further guide consumer behavior at the collective level. At present, when our leading political officials are absolved of productive and functional processes of compromise, they get away with doing little to nothing in plain sight.
Taking it a step further, mere individual actions also run risks of doing harm to the very things we may seek to make better. Effectively, calling out individual environmentally unfriendly activities becomes quixotic and toxic traps that constrain rather than compel significant action. Atomized self-righteous judgments of each other — feeling good about our actions while disparaging your aunt or uncle — effectively become ineffectual and even counterproductive, overlooking the larger-scale actions that we need in 2026. Also, bickering and whataboutism chatter like this distracts and divides us in a time when we must work collectively. We also reproduce rather than transform existing power relations and market structures that have perpetuated the human-caused climate change challenges we must address.
To date, we have largely been conned into fighting sustainability, environment and climate change challenges as individuals who scuttle around installing compact fluorescent lightbulbs and boasting of our “meat-free Mondays.” Again, while everything does count, this individualized mindset has stymied our collective capabilities to make positive and transformative, multi-scaled, multi-pronged changes in these times. As January 2026 gets going, we must connect up and scale up our individual actions with collective and larger-scale actions. As we pack away the gift paper, look to pull back on our indulgences, and settle again into our work routines, we must be gracious to our individual carbon-emitting selves as we crank up our collective pressures on political and business leaders and decision-makers as well as all of us collectively, together, now.
This is a biweekly sustainability and environment column authored by Max Boykoff. Max is a faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder, though the views expressed here are based upon his scholarly expertise and research/creative experience as well as personal views and should not be considered the university’s official position on any specific issue.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.